Taylor Swift: Spotify didn’t feel right

By admin

09 November 2014

Taylor Swift says having her music on Spotify “didn’t feel right”.

The 24-year-old Grammy winner pulled her tracks down from the popular free music streaming platform this week, in a decision that sparked controversy. Now she is defending her move in the name of artist integrity.

“It didn't feel right to me,” she told Yahoo! Music. “I felt like I was saying to my fans, 'If you create music someday, if you create a painting someday, someone can just walk into a museum, take it off the wall, rip off a corner off it, and it's theirs now and they don't have to pay for it.'” The Shake It Off hitmaker removed her entire catalogue of music from Spotify this week following the release of her latest album, 1989. She explained that at first she was “open minded” about the idea of working with the site, but later reneged because she was uncomfortable with the free model.

‘It didn't feel right to me’

"If I had streamed the new album, it's impossible to try to speculate what would have happened," she said, adding that “everything new, like Spotify, all feels to me a bit like a grand experiment. And I'm not willing to contribute my life's work to an experiment that I don't feel fairly compensates the writers, producers, artists, and creators of this music. And I just don't agree with perpetuating the perception that music has no value and should be free."

It’s also important to Taylor that her music is delivered to and bought by her fans in a collection rather than one song at a time. She wants to lead the way in declaring it’s important to value the work that goes into making an album.

"I'd rather be known for a collection of songs that go together and live together and belong together," she continued. "These are essentially installments of my life, two years at a time, and I work really hard to make sure that those installments are good enough to also apply to other people's lives in two-year periods of time. I'm so proud of my fans for going out there, over a million strong, and proving that albums still matter to them and that art is still viable to them.”